Some Word Usage Time Series

By: Jeff Clark    Date: Thu, 20 Aug 2009

I'm continuing my exploration of how frequently words are used in tweets during the various times of day. If you haven't seen them already, you might want to read Time Series for Word Counts in Tweets and Temporal Correlation for Words in Tweets for background information and details about the dataset.

Here are some word graphs for a few different beverages. 'Coffee' shows the strongest time dependence and is of course at it's peak during the morning hours. Both 'beer' and 'wine' rise gradually from about noon until 2-3am. Showing pretty flat (but noisy) graphs are both 'tea' and 'water'.

Tweet Word Time of Day Traces: Beverages

Some more collections of graphs follow. You can spot the trends yourself so I won't describe them all. Note that many of these charts are quite noisy. They could obviously be improved by using more data although I am already analyzing half a million tweets to get these results. Using 30 minute time slices rather than the 15 minute slices I'm currently using would smooth out the graphs as well.

Tweet Word Time of Day Traces: Foods
 
 
Tweet Word Time of Day Traces: Acronyms
 
 
Tweet Word Time of Day Traces: Feelings

The graph for 'happy' has some unusual peaks that look like they occur around 10am, 11am, noon, 1pm, and 2pm. I'm not sure why the regularity over time. These tweets are from Toronto during the month of July which includes the data for Canada Day on July 1st. Here are the graphs for the words highly correlated with 'happy' :

Tweet Word Time of Day Traces: Highly Correlated with 'Happy'

 


Temporal Correlation for Words in Tweets
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